The Press Saturday, September 20, 1930. Author Wanted.

Press, Volume LXVI, Issue 20038, 20 September 1930, Page 14

The Press Saturday, September 20, 1930. Author Wanted.

Mr John Masefield recently wrote to The Times, transmitting a demand which proves that the Laureateship is not wholly a sinecure. If the Poet Laureate is no longer obliged to write poems, he is expected—in Delhi at least —to trace them; for it was a citizen of that capital who, wasting no timA on subordinates, directly importuned Mr Masefield. While I was reading in the School here my Teacher once quoted from an English Poetry. The first line of tho poetry was:— "An Austrian Army awfully arrayed." Since then I several times tried to get out the whole Poetry, but unfortunately I am not successful. I therefore most respectfully beg to enquire if you could very kindly favour me with a copy of the whole complete j Poetry, or very kindly let me know who is the author of the Poem. Unhappily for the credit of his office, the Laureate could remember the poem, from his childhood, only " as far as the " letter H" — An Austrian Army awfully arrayed Boldly by battery besieged Belgrade; Cossack commanders cannonading come Dealing Destruction's devastating doom. Every endeavour engineers essay For Fame, for Fortune fighting furious Gaunt gunners grapple giving gashes good; Heaves high Els head heroic Hardihood— and his silence on the question of authorship was perhaps confessional. But the people of England ran eagerly to help him out. Of their "very " many " letters The Times printed two, one from Mr Claude E. Shebbeare, of Lincoln's Inn, one from their " obedient " servant, ' Indexerwho wrote from the shy, honoured address of Notes and Queries. Mr Shebbeare quoted the whole poem, from Hone's Table Book of 1827, where it appeared anonymously, "Addressed to the Admirers of " Alliteration and the Advocates of "Noisy Numbers" and artfully aided by the Virgilian motto: Ardentem aspicio atque afrectis auribus asto. "Indexer" reported that Mortimer Collins—a forgotten man of letters — had written to Notes and Queries in 1861 to say that, while he had always attributed the lines to Thbmas Hood, "his son, whome I have the honour to "call friend, thinks otherwise." At fliin point of uncertainty the question of their authorship was left for over twenty years. Then, in the issue for April 19th, 1884, "they are attributed "to the Rev. B. Poulter, Prebendary "of Winchester"; but a week later there appeared a reference to the,, recently published • life' of Alaric A. Watts, in which "his son .positively "statesthat they were written by his " father." This is disconcerting Nobody iflraa to have the pleasant speculations and doubts of a literary mystery —like the staffed pheasant to practiso on, in .Sana Welter's story—" blowed "right dean avay at the first f fire." Fortunately it is a free country, and those who like a little twilight can always answer a curtly " positive statement" with an "I don't believe it." It remains only to say that Mr Masefield must have been bombarded at Boar's Hill; for he wrote again to The Times to thank the " many hun- " dred " who answered his appeal, and to cry enough: Ah! author's answerers, all aid arrest, Britannia's bard's brows being bruised ■ but blest. ■ Even if we leave out of account the large classes of anonymous literature, like the Greek epitaphs, which Professor has beautifully trans- ' lated, or the many nameless Elizabethan songs, or the ballads, or the nursery rhymes, there are still innumerable pieces of prose and verse of unknown or uncertain ; origin. Among them are sayings of widie celebrity and influence, such as the famous: " Give me a child "until he is six years old, and you may "have him for the rest of his life." It has been assigned to Rousseau, to Tgnfttina Loyola, and to John Henry Newman; but which of them said it, if any, and where, is hard to establish and may be impossible. Et in Arcadia ego is the inscription on a tomb in a Nicolas Poussin landscape' in the Louvre; but Poussin probably borrowed it from a painting of Schidone's, and there the trail, ends. Few things in Scottish literature are more affecting flurn the "Canadian Boatsong," \srich contains the fine lines: From: the lone sheiling of the misty island Mountains divide us, and the waste of seas — Yet still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland, And we in. drejams behold the Hebrides. Though it is possible that either John Gait or Lockhart wrote thq lines, which became known through " Christo"pher North's" quoting them in Noetea Ambrosicmae, neither will strike many readers as a very likely candidate. When his memory did not supply hiiii with a quotation," Scott sometimes wrote a scrap of verse for a chapterheading and put "Old Song" after it. But his royal hand was often detected, as in the four splendid lilies beginning ' Sound, sound the clarion! Fill the fifel ' Hence the dismay with which it was discovered that they belonged to an otherwise undistinguished poem by Thomas Mordaunt. That such a sparrow should take this eagle flight was both incredible and, of course rather absurdly, repugnant. Mr Birrell came to the rescue with. the. ingenious, quite unsupported, but selfendearing suggestion that Scott had piidced up Mordaunt's poem -in the printing house, and, being fired by its subject, had added the single stanza, which? if ft was not written by Soott,

was written by a man who for that moment was Scott. Uncertainty here, which lets in a hope that Sir Walter did after all write it, is more blessed than cold certainty of Mordauut's having miraculously transcended himself. Great wits have walked the earth, unguessed at. When the Jansenist deacon, Paris, was buried in the churchyard of St. Medard, miracles at his tomb were reported. Crowds were attracted, and disturbances followed, so that the Court interposed, in 1732, and closed the churchyard. Somebody, who excusably but regrettably omitted to sign his name, wrote over the gate the couplet: Be par le Boy defense h Dieu Be faire miracle en ce lieu.

Gray grew melancholy over the mute inglorious Miltons; but the ones who spoke from darkness, and never owned their lines, or whose shadows and voices we are puzzled to distinguish from others', give us no cause for grief. They vex us a little, but they amuse us a great deal more.